430 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE AGRARIAN LAWS OF LYCURGUS, 



position. For, towards the close of the discourse (p. 287) the orator makes one 

 of the advocates of Spartan usages say, "that whereas every one of the other 

 states of Greece had been disturbed by frequent aristocratic and democratic 

 revolutions, in Sparta alone no one could point out either mutinies or massacres, 

 or unjust banishments, or confiscations of property, or violations of women, or 

 abolition of debts, or change in the form of the constitution, or Agrarian laws (y?? 

 ava,baafji,ovi), or any of the incurable diseases to which bodies politic are subject." 

 True; but this means only what we have already heard from Thucydides, that 

 the constitution, as settled by Lycurgus, had remained stable in its great supports 

 — a remarkable phenomenon in ancient Greece — for four hundred years, undis- 

 turbed by violent changes and sudden revolutions in the ownership of property ; 

 but that the Spartan land, at the great Dorian immigration, was originally divided 

 into equal lots, is incidentally asserted by the orator in a previous part of his dis- 

 course, p. 270 (r^5 ;^ou|ag ^j fl-geff^xe)- " laov " txn^ zxaerov), with which passagc the more vague 

 language of Plato in the laws (III. 684 D.) is perfectly consistent. 



The silence of Xenophon on the subject of the Spartan Agrarian laws might 

 appear, at first sight, more difficult to account for. In a special treatise, such as 

 the little book ct^/ Kaxilaiiimw ToXiriia; unquestiouably is, a characteristic feature 

 of national life so prominently mentioned by Plutaech and Polybius, might 

 naturally have been expected to find a place. But when the extremely slight 

 and flimsy character of this treatise is considered, and when the special fact is 

 also borne in mind, that, though professing to give some idea not only of the 

 Spartan education, but of the Spartan political constitution, the existence of the 

 ixxXtjcia or congregation of the Commons, is not even mentioned ; and when we 

 consider farther, that the inequality of land in Lacedsemon, so glaring to the eye 

 of Aristotle, must already, in the days of Xenophon, have become so great as 

 to render the Lycurgean legislation on this point a matter more of historical 

 learning than of present social .significance, we must hold the silence of this 

 writer on this particular point to be a matter of the smallest moment, certainly 

 not of sufficient weight to countervail the positive and distinct testimony of such 

 a grave and judicious writer as Polybius. 



So much for the authorities, or what theologians call the external evidence. 

 As to internal probabilities and presumptions, however our modern British ideas 

 may incline us to look with a certain suspicion on all accounts of social equality 

 in the tenure of land, it is quite certain, not only that the ancients generally held 

 a land-tenure essential to citizenship, but that a certain equality in this respect 

 was looked on as the sign of a healthy condition of the body politic. The whole 

 history of Agrarian laws amongst the Romans was only a violent exposition of 

 one of the oldest principles of ancient citizenship, that the land which had been 

 acquired by the exertions of common brothers in arms, should be possessed by 

 the co-ordinate ownership of equal citizens. But in the case of the Spartans it 



